If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Goodbye Capital Region, hello Edmonton Metropolitan Region

For decades, we’ve been saddled with that absurdly generic name, a name that seemed designed, in a quasi-Orwellian manner, to erase our city’s name from the map. We were the anonymous city, which could not speak its name aloud, allegedly for fear of annoying our regional neighbours.

It was a ridiculous situation, one that savagely undercut our ability to market this place as a magnet for investment, as a tourist destination, as a new home for immigrants.

But no longer.

Late last week, by order-in-council, the province gave us our name back. It officially changed the name of the Capital Region Board to the Edmonton Metropolitan Region Board.

Which means we now live together in the Edmonton Metropolitan Region.

...the board invited an international “site selector” from a big New York commercial real estate firm for a visit. He told the mayors that when he searched “Capital Region”online, this area didn’t come up at all. There were just too many other “capital regions” around the world.

Malcolm Bruce, the board’s CEO, says that meeting marked a turning point. Regional mayors truly realized just how self-defeating the “Capital Region” marketing strategy was. And now, two years later, the “Capital Region” is gone.

Great news! However, everyone else need to follow suit - corporations, non-profits, media personalities and every day people.

“You have to dream big. If we want to be a little city, we dream small. If we want to be a big city, we dream big, and this is a big idea.” - Mayor Stephen Mandel, 02/22/2012

I think it's time. The old Capital Region board wasn't well-known outside of Edmonton. There also wasn't much in the way of co-operation among the municipalities.

But wait, Beaumont says it isn't a suburb of Edmonton! They're right... they barely qualify as a skin tag. The sooner all the surrounding leech communities realize we either win as a region or fail as a bunch of independent squabbling brats, the better.

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction" - Blaise Pascal